The Value Of A Link

We have an opportunity to get a link from a very large traffic .org site. It is for supporters, based on a (cough) donation, and Im wondering if it is worth it.

Is it ok to mention the page and cost?

It is the 5th largest internet site. Would be on their benefactors page. There are many other sites linking from the page, and its obvious they are on there for the backlink value.

Please do not comment on the ethics of this. This is not meant to be a discussion about if its wrong to pay for links, or if or when google will find out and devalue paid links (obviously has not happened yet)

I know sometimes one link can do wonders for rankings, where thousands of others can not. But wondering if there is any way to quanitfy this.

Also f we link to the home page, the link juice (alot I hope) would pass through to the deeper pages, and increase their rankings for their own target keywords?

No, there's really no way to quantify the actual value of a link (apart from the price you pay for it, of course). Even if, the day the page containing the link is updated in Google's index, your rankings for all your targeted keywords go way up, and your traffic and profits follow, you won't be able to say with 100% certainty that all of those changes are completely due to that one link, because there are always so many other variables at play. Besides, one link isn't going to have that massive an effect. If you had the one and only off-site link from Google's home page I bet that would help you considerably. I wouldn't bet on it changing your life.

Of course, if the link sends you direct traffic that leads to sales, I'd say you can feel free to credit those sales to the link.

QUOTE

Is it ok to mention the page and cost?

Probably not a good idea. For one thing, others might jump at the chance to pay what you're thinking of paying, and the more links there are on that page, the less you're going to get out of it. It's also against forum policy

1 link = unknown amount of external PageRankunknown amount of external PageRank = some indeterminable number of additional pages on your site being crawled a little bit more, indexed more thoroughly

In the time you take to agonize over the decision to risk incurring a search engine penalty that could take the majority of your traffic away, how much content could you have written that would have ranked for hundreds or thousands of expressions, possibly earning other links over time that would surpass the PageRank and anchor text whose value would probably be temporary?